My day job is a mix of quantitative and fundamental investment analysis. What that essentially means is that I spend my time looking for situations where the numbers don't match the narrative - and I can't help but notice that in the Australian Federal election result the narrative and the numbers ...
Final look at election odds before the election:
Quick update to election odds from earlier this week after the final leadership debate:
There have been a number of commentators who have made the point that we have inflation in things we need (housing, utilities, fruit&veg, hospital services) and disinflation in things that we want (ice cream, TVs, cars, washing machines etc):
We have long been of the view that the Reserve Bank is misdiagnosing the economic environment and interest rates are not going up any time soon. Over the past few months, interest rate markets have joined our pessimism and bond yields have fallen - netting a tidy profit on longer-dated bond ...
From SuperRatings last week Lonsec has sustainable (AKA ethical or ESG) super funds charging high fees and underperforming:
From Bloomberg:
Chant West has the latest performance stats:
We understand that many of our investors are concerned by the ongoing pullback in Australian house prices, and are now worried about this having an impact on their stock portfolios.
The Wall Street Journal was out yesterday with a comment expressing optimism on 2020 earnings forecasts that is wrong:
Modern Monetary Theory or MMT seems to be being discussed everywhere lately, and a number of high profile debates between the economic establishment such as Paul Krugman, Ken Rogoff, Jerome Powell and Larry Summers on one side and MMT advocates (most of which are not economic luminaries) have ...
Quick shout out to AQR (a large US quantitative manager) who have a post out fighting the good fight against some of the big issues with funds with high levels of unlisted assets - this includes many of the large industry funds in Australia. Three of the key issues they raise:
For years, the RBA has argued that an economic recovery is "just around the corner" with wages and inflation about to increase. So far the RBA has been wrong - their preferred trimmed mean inflation has been below target for 3 years and counting. The issue is the penalty for being wrong during a ...
